English (Core) · Ch 1 — The Portrait of a Lady
About the Unit
About the Unit
The Hornbill textbook closes the chapter with a short descriptor of what each exercise section is meant to do. In our words:
Understanding the text. These tasks cover the entire text and help you summarise the various phases of this autobiographical account; they are based on the facts presented. It helps to read the text silently, paragraph by paragraph — for example, noting how things changed when the author went to the village school, the city school and then the university.
Talking about the text. Peer discussion before writing. These questions invite personal, subjective responses to the facts of the text and connect its events to your own life, bringing out how universal such relationships and feelings are.
Thinking about language. These questions ask you to picture the language the author and his grandmother must have used, to think about your own home language, to find equivalents for English phrases in your language, and to relate the text to emotionally meaningful songs in your own tongue.
Working with words. This section highlights the different uses of common words like tell and take, words for different manners of walking, and semantically related word-groups. You can enrich your vocabulary further using a dictionary. …